Rory Read talks cloud, streaming

In a rare interview with The Washington Post, AMD CEO Rory Read outlined the chipmaker’s cloud-centric strategy with a twist.

Read pointed out that PC chips used to constitute much of AMD’s revenue, but now he expects their share to go down. In two years as much as 50 percent of revenue should come from emerging high-growth segments, namely cloud computing.

Since cloud computing is changing the way we access content and services, Read says AMD has to change “how it conceives of new chips” and we can only guess that he is referring to custom cloud parts.

“For those that embrace the change [from local to cloud computing], that’s where the success will come from,” he said.

Interestingly, Read also mentioned AMD’s investment in cloud gaming outfit CiiNow. The collaboration will allow AMD hardware to stream video games to other devices, much like Nvidia’s GRID.

So to all those AMD fans who moaned about latencies and other technical issues faced by Nvidia, guess what, AMD and NV are in the same boat, as always.